


Armchair Psychology

by idiotbrothers



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fix-It, Gen, Suicidal Thoughts, Therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-04
Updated: 2014-04-04
Packaged: 2018-01-18 04:55:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1415815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/idiotbrothers/pseuds/idiotbrothers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Therapy for the skeptical and the desperate.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Armchair Psychology

Dean stared as Sam took one of the seats facing the immaculately-ordered desk, eyes flickering from Sam’s shadowed frown, to the encased certificates on the wall, to a blank notepad resting to the left of the doctor’s clasped hands. He gave a sharp nod, though at what, even he didn’t know, and moved for the door. “Well, you guys seem good and settled, so I’ll get out of your hair and let you get on with the therapeutic mumbo jumbo.” He’d barely clasped the doorknob before the psychiatrist—Doctor Hammond, according to his name plaque—spoke up. “Not so fast.” Dean froze.

“Excuse me?” He raised his eyebrows at Sam questioningly, who merely gave him a tired shrug. The doctor inclined his head toward the empty chair next to Sam. “I think,” he stated, peering up at Dean through horn-rimmed glasses, “that you should be present for at least our first session.” Dean’s eyebrows climbed even higher. “Me? Why? It’s Sam who needs fixing here. I’m just paying for the treatment. ‘Sides, what happened to, um, doctor-patient confidentiality?” The doctor leaned forward in his seat, repeatedly turning his head from Sam to Dean as he spoke. “I’d like the opportunity to speak with both of you together, if only this once. Based on what little Sam’s divulged to me over the phone about the two of you, and your relationship, I’d like to see how far we can get in a group session. I would, of course, advise that Sam come in on his own for individual sessions, but for now I’d like to address you as a unit.”

Dean shuffled his feet impatiently and clicked his tongue. “You saying we need  _couples therapy_?”

Hammond regarded him with a sage smile. “That’s one way of putting it, I suppose.” Sam directed Dean’s attention with a long-suffering sigh. “Suck it up and do what he says, alright? The sooner we start, the sooner we can go home.” Dean dropped into the empty chair, swallowing most of his irritation down with the thought that any little thing that went towards making Sam better was worth it. Mostly. “Geez, okay. Get on with it.” He waved a hand at Hammond, urging him to start flapping his lips about whatever Freudian or Jungian bullcrap he thought would best get to the root of the matter. Hammond rearranged his hands on the desk. “Before we begin, I can’t emphasize enough the value of patient-led therapy. I want both of you to feel free to speak your minds on anything at all, regardless of whether or not you would be going on a tangent.”

Sam spoke up again at this, brow creased. “You’re not one of those Humanistic types, are you? You into that fluffy, heart-touching PCT stuff?”

"I have a feeling I wouldn’t get anywhere with you two if I were. No, I’m what we in the field call an eclectic psychotherapist. My approach is more…integrative. But enough about me." He swept an encouraging hand from Sam to Dean. "I’m paid to listen, so go right ahead and talk. Either one of you. Go on."

Dean stared at Sam, who avoided his eyes and studied a table leg intently. Dean cleared his throat. “Well, uh. We’re brothers. But I guess you probably knew that from the forms, or from whatever Sam’s told you. Anyway. We…we’ve sort of stuck together our entire lives…” Dean paused and glanced at Sam again, who was eyeing a different table leg like he wanted to make love to it, or something. “And, y’know. It probably goes without saying that we’ve had our…ups and downs. But…Sam kind of went through a thing recently, a bunch of  _trials_ , you might say. Almost ended up killing himself because of it. And…it’s like he would do it all over again, in a heartbeat. And I don’t know how to convince him that he’s  _wrong_.”

"Wrong about…?" Hammond urged.

Dean wiped his palms over his jeans before resuming, feeling like a moron for even setting foot in this guy’s office. But, hey, desperate times. “Just. For one thing, he blames himself for a shitload of stuff that, as far as I’m concerned, we’ve buried in the past. Like, I’m just now finding out how screwed in the head he is, thinking the way he does about himself. I don’t know how—”

"Stop lying, Dean."

 Dean whipped around to look at his brother, whose bottom lip was trembling angrily. “What the hell, man, I’m not lying to you. You  _know_  I don’t blame you for—” “For what? Wanna be more specific? Like when you gave me that  _checklist_  outside the church, of everything I’ve ever fucked up in the past ten years? It came so easily to you then, didn’t it. And you’re trying to tell me that it’s all water under the bridge? Bullshit.” “Sam, shut up. I didn’t mean it that way! I’m sorry I ever said any of that. Didn’t know you’d take it so seriously.”

Sam banged his fist on Hammond’s desk, hard enough to make his pencil holder quiver. “Don’t. Don’t pretend like it was just the one time. I’ve got it all  _catalogued_  up here, every distrustful word, every time you’ve looked at me like I’m a…” He swallowed, averted his eyes. Dean leaned forward in his chair, trying to reestablish eye contact. “You’re  _not_ , Sam. Why won’t you believe me? I’ve never been afraid of you. Afraid  _for_  you, sure, always, but. Everything I’ve accused you of being, before, that was all crap.”

"I can’t…allow myself to hope that you’re telling me the truth. I can’t. Not anymore. It’s easier to believe that you hate me. It’s what I deserve." Dean’s heart sank. "Dammit, Sam." A silence fell over the room, the sound of Hammond’s pen scrawling some convoluted note on his notepad underlining the tense unhappiness that neither Sam nor Dean could do anything about. Hammond looked up after half a minute, setting aside his pen. "That was a remarkably insightful beginning. A much quicker breakthrough than I’d anticipated. It’s obvious the two of you have a complicated history."

"That’s what you call a breakthrough? Didn’t feel that way to me," Dean muttered.

“Oh, it was very helpful. We’ve established that the current stalemate between you, presumably brought on by Sam’s suicidal ideation, is primarily due to a crippling buildup of guilt around each of you that has no determined start or end. Am I wrong?” There was no answer. “Well, then. I think it would be  in your best interests to work through the source of the guilt, so as to resolve it. You seem to have different perspectives in that regard. Dean? Care to elaborate?”

Dean groaned and got out of his chair, considering the idea of waltzing out of the room and never having to talk about his feelings again. He began to pace instead. “Can’t you just tell me how to keep Sam from trying to off himself every chance he gets?” 

Hammond shook his head. “What we’re doing now is slowly approaching that goal. There’s no quick fix for something like this.”

“Listen, doctor,” Sam started, looking more miserable by the second, “I can’t be fixed. I’m flawed by nature, always have been. So this is all useless; I don’t know how I let Dean talk me into it.”

"Why do you see yourself that way?" Dean wanted to slam a fist into Hammond’s face to stop him asking questions, but knew that it would do more harm than good. He decided to interrupt Sam before he could say anything else to deprecate himself. "I swear to God, if I hear you put yourself down for  _this_ , of all things, one more time…” Dean stopped pacing and turned to Hammond. “Nature, my ass. He thinks he’s ‘unclean’ because of something that was done  _to_  him. He was just a fucking kid!” Sam’s frown deepened as Hammond asked him, “I gather you were abused as a child?”

"What? No!" Sam exclaimed in the same instant that Dean said, "Yeah, you could say so". They glared at each other for a brief moment, during which they silently agreed that it would be easier to let Hammond come to his own conclusions about the supernatural events they were referring to. Sam looked supremely displeased with the notion, especially when Hammond asked him if he wanted to talk about it. "No. There’s nothing to tell."

"That’s fine. Can you think of anything else you  _do_  want to talk about, that might have contributed to your negative self-concept?” Sam made a face and turned his head downward again, fiddling with the hem of his shirt. Dean sat back down in his chair reluctantly and crossed his arms, waiting for someone who wasn’t him to break the silence that had dropped in again, uninvited. Hammond set his palms flat on the desk. “Tell me: why are you two here, right now?”

“ _Why_?” Dean scoffed. “Because I decided that whatever’s wrong with Sam, health-wise, is only getting worse the longer I’m around him. Plus, this kind of thing seems to work on TV, so.”

"Do you think that’s true, Sam, that living with Dean isn’t good for you?"

Sam offered nothing but a quiet noise of dissent, clearly not up to any more sharing and caring. Hammond looked to Dean. “If you believe that, and you want Sam to get better, why haven’t you left him?”

"You think I haven’t tried!? It’s…it’s never worked. We’re…"

"We keep each other human, right?" Sam’s voice was barely audible. There was something particularly odd, something loaded, about that sentence, but Dean didn’t have time to puzzle it out; he was still mulling gloomily over Hammond’s question.

"Honestly, I’m a selfish bastard. Because, really, I can sit here and say that the reason I haven’t fucked off is that we’re better together than apart, or whatever…but the truth is that I haven’t left because I’m too weak to do it."

"And why’s that?"

"Because, because I…need—" Dean choked on his own words, unable to give voice to what he suddenly felt he needed to say. "Take it easy; we have lots of time ahead of us."

"You need to learn how to let me go, Dean," Sam blurted, talking over Hammond. "And I don’t mean that in the way you think, so don’t start beating yourself up about how you’ve been depriving me of whatever picket fence existence you think I want."

"What—what are you saying, then?"

"I’m saying you gotta stop bringing me back. Please. Please, just let me…"

Dean clenched his fists, anger bubbling up so quickly he was almost dizzy with it. “You can’t fucking ask that of me.”

"Oh, can’t I? You’ve got no right, Dean, no right to keep—"

"What, so you’d rather I’d left you to rot, back in Cold Oak? There’s no way you were ready to die all those years ago, not like that."

Sam rubbed at his temples. “Yes, I was. Compared to the alternative, to what you did, I’d have picked death in a second. But I never get the choice, do I. Not once.”

"Damn right you don’t. Obviously you don’t know the first thing about taking care of yourself."

Sam’s mouth twisted into a sneer. “And  _you_  do?” Dean was so angry that he wanted to hit Sam. Which would be disastrous for a number of reasons, a  _lesser_  one being that Sam was still woozy from his latest near-death experience and couldn’t afford further injury. Dean put his head in his hands and tried to shut out Sam and Hammond and the restrictive, dark walls of the office. No such luck.

"Judging by your allusions, is it safe to say that your line of work involves constant life-or-death situations? How long have you both lived like this?"

When Sam answered, his voice was weak and strained. “Since we were kids. Our dad was an ex-Marine. Decided we needed training.”

"Training for what? What is it that you do?"

Neither Sam nor Dean answered, so Hammond simply latched onto a different tack. “Do you think, perhaps, that you should ease out of this lifestyle? Whether you think you want to or not, it might be recuperative, especially considering the mental stress you’re both under.”

Sam exhaled through his nose and shifted in his seat, studiously avoiding eye contact with anybody.

"Like he said, we  _can’t_  do that.”

Hammond raised an eyebrow. “I don’t recall either of you saying anything on the matter.”

"We’ve tried splitting up before," Sam clarified, impatient, "and it’s never worked out well for anyone involved".

"Ah. It seems you…equate settling down with breaking off from one another. You do realize that the two aren’t mutually exclusive? You could stabilize your lives  _together_ , give the ‘picket-fence life’, as you called it, another try.”

Dean winced, thinking moodily of Amelia, of Benny, of Lisa and Ben, of Jessica. Of the gigantic flaming disasters that he associated with each of their names, of the tension that had come between him and Sam in the times leading up to those associations. He thought of a much younger version of himself, quietly miserable at the notion that Sam would leave him once they’d taken out the Yellow-Eyed Demon, unable to imagine any sort of a future for himself that didn’t include his little brother. He thought of the immeasurable cluster of instances in which he’d broken out the tired ‘normal life’ speech for Sam’s benefit, fresh guilt spearing through him every time he claimed that it was what he wanted most for Sam. “Jesus, Sammy…we’re so fucked.”

Sam glanced up, unhappiness radiating off him, and Dean felt like he had finally fallen over the edge of the familiar cliff that he’d been speeding towards for as long as he could remember, like he was free-falling but he couldn’t see what was waiting for him at the bottom. Next thing he knew, large black spots were floating in the corners of his vision, Hammond was instructing him to breathe deep, and Sam’s hand was rubbing slow circles into his shuddering back.

"You okay? Talk to me, man," Sam’s voice entreated, sounding strangely distorted through Dean’s _whatever-this-was_. A panic attack, maybe. He was having a panic attack in a shrink’s office while his barely-recovering suicidal brother hovered over him, and it wasn’t even one of the more frustrating moments of his life. “Shit,” Dean got out, heart thundering like it wanted to climb out of his throat, fingertips tingling painfully as he groped blindly for Sam. “Hey, Dean, it’s okay. It’s alright.” Sam looped his arms around him, holding him tightly enough that Dean felt himself relaxing even as his breaths faltered and his body continued to shake uncontrollably. He tried to tune in to Sam and Hammond’s muted exchange, fingers curling in Sam’s sleeve as he registered the fear in his brother’s voice. Telling himself to get a grip, Dean sucked in several more long inhales, evening out the harshness in his chest, and tried to focus on Sam, on the feel of him, solid and deceptively strong.

"I’m okay," Dean breathed after a while, and Sam said, "Thank god," but he didn’t let go, hands trembling minutely against Dean’s back as he drew several short, relieved breaths. "I’m okay, Sam," Dean murmured, touching his fingers to Sam’s face tentatively.

"I can see why it wouldn’t work to break you two up," Hammond proclaimed suddenly, making them both jump as they remembered that they weren’t alone. They pulled apart awkwardly and settled back into their own chairs, Dean feeling even more jittery and disquieted than before. "Though…that might not necessarily be a good thing," Hammond continued, cryptic edge to his voice, and Dean gave him a cool glare. "The hell’s that supposed to mean?" Hammond looked unbothered by Dean’s reaction, his goddamned calculating expression apparently a permanent part of his stupid face. "You and Sam seem dangerously—"

Dean made a disgusted noise and said, “If I hear one more person tell us we’re  _codependent_ …”

"I wasn’t going to say that, but now that you mention it, it’s an accurate description. And if that’s the impression I’ve gotten from a mere surface examination of your problems, if people you know would characterize you that way, it’s clear that this runs deep."

"Yeah, yeah," Dean huffed, frowning at the carpet, "Can we go back to talking about Sam?"

"Haven’t you been listening to the guy at all?" Sam cut in, "He can’t snap his fingers and make me better, Dean, and if you expect that to happen, maybe we shouldn’t be here at all."

“Maybe we shouldn’t,” Dean said, narrowing his eyes, “This’s obviously just getting us even more pissed at each other, anyway.”

“Coincidentally,” Hammond interrupted, forcing a cough to get their attention, “Our time for today is up.” Dean stood, fists balled up at his sides. “Oh,  _great_. Fantastic. Thanks for nothing, Doctor. We won’t be seeing you again soon.”

“Dubious though this may sound,” Hammond went on, ignoring the sarcasm, “Any good first session is characterized by getting as much off your chests as you can. And by that standard, you’ve achieved quite a bit today. Considering the pervasiveness of the issues you discussed, I’d highly recommend coming in to see me again, even if it’s just for a single follow-up meet.” His gaze was fixed on Sam as he continued, “And now that you have my number, you can always give me a call, if you find that’s preferable.” To Dean’s surprise, Sam nodded thoughtfully as he was getting up from his chair, answered, “Maybe I will.”

Hammond leaned back in his seat and smiled a little. “Good. Perhaps you can even convince your brother to get in on it, like he originally did for you.”

“Doubtful,” Sam said, but he thanked the doctor genuinely and shook his hand, which is more than could be said for Dean, who barely managed a brusque nod of acknowledgement before he began tromping out of the office. He didn’t look back to see if Sam was following him through the parking lot, the sound of his little brother’s slow, shuffling footsteps reassurance enough. Before they’d even gotten to the car, Sam muttered a quiet “Dean”, voice low and hoarse. Dean stopped walking, took a breath to steel himself against the inevitable before turning around.

He froze mid-complaint when he took in the pallid shade of Sam’s skin, the way his throat was working. Instantly, Dean had one anchoring hand at Sam’s back and the other on his shoulder, attempting to ease the tremors that had overtaken him. “Easy, Sam, you’re okay. Can you—Can you stand? Here, just…” Dean guided Sam gently to his knees on the gritty asphalt, kneeling with him in front of a sad patch of industrial shrubbery. “Let it out,” he commanded, indicating the ground in front of them. Sam shuddered in response and hissed something that sounded like “undignified”. Dean laughed, but it was a completely joyless sound.

“Dude, I cleaned your barf out of my shoes yesterday, remember? You’ve puked in everything  _including_  the kitchen sink; it’s a little late to start caring about dignity.” Sam groaned and slapped his palms against the pavement as he bent over and threw up everything he’d eaten in the past twenty-four hours. Which, considering he’d probably only gotten down half a salad and the soup Dean had made him that morning, shouldn’t have looked as viscous as it did. When the dry heaving had finally stopped, Sam sat up and wiped roughly at the strings of spittle on his chin, holding his hands away from himself like he wished he had one of those packets of moist towelettes that got him going. Dean was glad he’d remembered to pull Sam’s bangs back this time; earlier that week Sam had used up both his own and Dean’s conditioner after he’d gotten regurgitated gunk in his hair.

“You okay?” Dean asked, knowing full well that Sam  _wasn’t_ , that he hadn’t been for years. “No,” Sam grunted, easing himself up tentatively, one wide palm gripping Dean’s elbow for balance. “Yeah, that sounds about right.” Dean felt about a hundred years old, even more disillusioned with the current state of affairs than he was before the hour they’d just wasted with that quack psychiatrist. He dragged a hand over his face and hazarded, “What do we do, Sam? How can we…” There was a pit in his stomach, and he could feel the fever rolling off Sam in waves, and there was nothing waiting for them at home aside from a moldering pile of casework and the sense that everything they were was beginning to chip away like peeling paint, the brunt of decades of discontentment finally falling through the veil they’d continued to stuff it behind. “It’s, whatever, Dean. It—it doesn’t matter. We’ll play through it, right? We’ve dealt with worse.”

_Play through the pain_. Dean remembered telling Sam that, realized with a frown that that was how they’d been doing things forever, cramming everything that didn’t fit into the daily grind of their lives away in black boxes until it began to ooze out and burn holes in them. Was it really such a surprise that Dean hadn’t realized how little worth Sam placed on getting through the Trials with his life intact until that tense moment in the church? He suddenly felt like he had to lean on something, but the closest thing to him was his brother, and wasn’t that a cosmic kick in the pants. Dean let his breath whistle out through his teeth, faced Sam head-on for attempt number two.

“No. No, we can’t play through it. We can’t—it can’t continue like this. Help me—help me understand where you’re coming from. Tell me what I’m doing wrong.” Sam bit his lip, chewed on it silently for half a minute. His hand was still over Dean’s elbow, moist warmth bleeding through the fabric of his sleeve. “We just sat through a therapy session, and you didn’t seem to be getting it in there, so what makes you think I’ll make any more sense to you out here?” Dean opened his mouth, shut it helplessly.

The look on Sam’s face was wistful, not a trace of hostility left there in the wake of all the yelling they’d been doing not ten minutes ago. Dean grappled for a fragment of a thought, alighted on it before Sam could brush past him to get to the car, before they could shut down any and all semblances of this conversation and go back to pretending that they were both fine with things as they were.

“Why were you okay with dying, back there?” Sam heaved a deep sigh. “Dean, we could’ve  _closed the gates of Hell_ —”

“Not what I’m talking about, and you know it. What I’m saying is, what did I do to make you feel like…like I wouldn’t stop you from going through with it? I know I’ve been kind of—okay, I’ve been an asshole, this year; I haven’t been listening to you, and the way I talked about Benny…anyway. Just, just give it to me straight: was it something specific I did? Something I said?”

Sam tucked a strand of hair behind his ear and looked off to the side before answering. “You want the truth? Okay, how do I say this. We’re, uh…we’re  _uneven_.”

Dean blinked. “What does—”

"Give me a second, it’s hard to—alright, think of it this way: we’re not partners, not really. The give-and-take isn’t there; it’s more like, we’re trying to one-up each other with who can  _give_  more. And when, when we— _I_  make myself stop sacrificing, you get angry at me. And that makes me feel like my only worth is in giving myself up for you, like you only… _tolerate_  me out of necessity. Does that—does that make sense?”

Through the muddled turn that his thoughts had taken, Dean made note of the vulnerability in Sam’s eyes, of the tell-tale crease between his eyebrows that told Dean that he had to proceed with caution, that he couldn’t risk screwing this up.

"It’s not like that," he started, speaking as gently as he could, because he knew that it would be hard enough as it is to make Sam see what he was talking about. "I’m not  _tolerating_  you out of  _self-preservation_ , Sam. The reason I got so upset when you said you didn’t look for me is—god, I thought this was obvious—I _like_  doing this. The job, with you. Wouldn’t have it any other way. And I’m sorry for, uh. Expecting you to go crazy while I was gone. I guess that doesn’t make me look too good, to be pissed that you didn’t.”

Sam smiled crookedly. “I did, though. Go crazy. Would’ve driven off a cliff if it weren’t for Amelia, y’know. So what does that say about me?”

“ _Sam_ —”

"But that’s not the problem here; the problem is…you don’t respect me. Not my choices, or my feelings—"

"Sam, I—"

"Please, let me finish." Dean clamped his mouth shut.

"I’d been okay with that for a long time now: I didn’t deserve to be respected after all the shit I’d pulled, so I couldn’t complain when you made decisions for me. But with the trials, after I started feeling like I could…scrub my guilt clean, redeem myself…I got to thinking, I want things to be different between us. I want you to treat me like an equal. So it really stung to hear you talk about me like I was still a  _job_  you had to manage, after all these years.” He sucked in a breath, shot Dean a nervous glance as he waited for him to say something. 

Dean felt utterly floored, couldn’t think of the right thing to say, of anything he  _could_  say that would fix all the wrong he’d somehow managed to inject into Sam’s head. So he hugged Sam instead, dragging him in as hard as he dared and wishing he knew how to convey to Sam everything that was roiling in his head. Sam shivered slightly against him, and Dean stroked a hand down his back calmingly before pulling back to look him in the eye.

 

"…Things’re gonna be different from now on, Sam. Call it a promise." He couldn’t get much more than that past the lump in his throat, but it appeared to have been enough, because Sam’s mouth was slowly—very slowly—curving into something that almost resembled a smile. 


End file.
